Well, partly, at least, according to showrunner Tim Minear

"The Sykes-Francisco relationship is the thing they got exactly right,” says the former Buffy and Angel writer about the central stars in the original show – two cops, one of whom was an alien, the other human. “The other thing I told Sci-Fi is the thing I’m missing on television is a ‘70s cop show. What’s not on television? Starsky and Hutch. It’s not there. Lethal Weapon. It’s not there. I think you can take that sensibility, without it being kitschy, but in a post-modern, Tarantino kind of way and have that be a way in.”

On a more serious note, Minear says that he reckons the show is way of doing an alien invasion story that, "is not Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or gleaming metal ships hovering over cities with laser canons. There’s a way to do an alien invasion story that’s real, and creeping and complex, but totally recognisable. Because it’s happening right now, more so in Europe than in the States. It’s an alien invasion not through hovering space ships and laser beams, but through birth rates and demography. Alien Nation would draw partly from that European clash of civilizations and drop it into the continental US. A French-like ghetto slum in Dallas, or a Gaza Strip in Seattle. The central thematic question is assimilation versus balkanisation.”